Music for Barrow AFC (pt.1)
“Music is something one takes before or after the meal, but never the meal itself.” Giorgio De Chirico, No Music (1913).
Below are some ideas so far for creating a piece of music for the ground, with the aim of exploring an overall concept of football as a performance involving players and spectators. Utilising a mixture of field recordings, music and spoken word to look at ways of using the ground as a place to experiment and ultimately as a stage in itself.
1) One idea is to develop a piece of music based around the team’s history and current fortunes. This would involve creating a series of simple musical motifs derived from past and present league tables, resulting in a compressed musical history with each group of notes following league positions for each month of every year of the team’s existence. Breaking each season down into a series of mathematically generated musical modules with major and minor keys representing success or defeat. An alternative (and perhaps more manageable approach to this would involve creating a smaller set of musical narratives based around famous players, events and goals in the club’s history. This draws upon the idea of the ‘Oracular lyre’ featured in the story Ka by Russian futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, using a pythagorean correlation between musical tones and historical chronology. Taking this one step further, it may be possible to generate a short piece of music that changes every week with the team’s fortunes throughout the year, and is performed at each match by a volunteer instrumentalist/soloist drawn from the supporters, reporting musically on the previous match.
